History of the Family 8 (2003) 495 – 516
The Jews of early modern Marburg, 1640s—1800
A case study in family and household organization
Gerald L. Soliday*
School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas-Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083-0688, USA
Abstract
This article examines Jewish household and family organization in a middle-sized German city, the
Upper Hessian regional center of Marburg, the population of which ranged from 2500 to 6000 from the
Thirty Years War to the end of the 18th century. Some general hypotheses about population development,
household structure, and family life conveniently summarized by Toch [Toch, M. (1995). Aspects of
stratification in early modern German Jewry: Population history and village Jews. In R. P. Hsia & H.
Lehmann (Eds.). In and out of the ghetto: Jewish-Gentile relations in late medieval and early modern
Germany (pp. 77-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] serve as an organizational frame for the
case study. In Toch’s view, Jews’ comparative wealth, as well as governmental restrictions on their
settlement and marriage in central Europe, led to their having larger and more complex households than
those of the Christian majority. While household enumerations over time confirm several of Toch’s
observations, especially the larger size of Jewish families, neither Hessian settlement policy nor local
Marburg opposition prevented the Jewish minority of about 1% from keeping pace with general
population growth. Moreover, Jews did not respond to their regulated living conditions and status as
cultural outsiders with a family organization exhibiting remarkably more internal complexity than did
Christian households.
D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Household organization; Jewish household; Christian household
1. Introduction
In early modern Central Europe, most Jews lived in villages and towns, not the large cities
where their presence was so striking in the medieval period and then again from roughly the
* Tel.: +1-972-883-2760; fax: +1-972-883-2989.
E-mail address: [email protected] (G.L. Soliday).
1081-602X/$ – see front matter D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2003.07.001
496
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
mid-19th into the mid-20th century. True, there were still a few exceptionally large
communities in major urban centers like Prague, Frankfurt, Worms, Hamburg-Altona,
Vienna, and Berlin. Some had survived the pogroms and expulsions from the mid-14th
through the early 16th centuries, while other large congregations developed later with the
encouragement of 17th- and 18th-century governments eager for population and economic
growth. From the late medieval period, however, the Jews remaining in the Holy Roman
Empire were typically dispersed through its central and southwestern regions in smaller
groups, usually under 10 families. Indeed, the economic historian Toch (1995) has estimated
that over half of the localities still tolerating them had only one or two Jewish households,
while another 25% housed between three and nine (p. 82). Current researchers are calling
attention to the economic, social, and cultural lives of these rather neglected ‘‘rural Jews’’
(Landjuden), as they are often called, though Battenberg has rightly cautioned against
overemphasizing their rural nature (in Richarz and Rürup, 1997, pp. 9–35). Their religious
and commercial links with larger communities probably continued to give early modern
German Jews a quasi-urban character, even as they ordinarily settled in villages and towns
under the special protection of territorial rulers.
Always highly suspect in Christian society but also considered economically beneficial by
some of its powerful elements, they were a marginal ethnic group subject to regulations
codified in special Jewish ordinances. These and other laws set official limits on their
numbers, places of domicile, means of earning a livelihood, and even social interactions with
their neighbors—all with an eye to keeping the stubborn unbelievers religiously and
culturally isolated as well as inhibiting their possible numerical growth and economic
competition with the Christian majority. How did German Jewry fare under such restrictions?
What responses to their precarious conditions enabled ordinary Jews to survive—in some
circumstances to thrive, in others to fall into poverty and criminality? Unfortunately, still too
little is known about ‘‘ordinary Jews,’’ especially in the early modern period. Much early
research focused on major figures in Jewish religious and intellectual history, just as it
emphasized the medieval period and then, more recently, has rightly examined the modern
historical developments culminating in the horrendous crime of the Holocaust (Richarz in
Richarz and Rürup, 1997, pp. 1–8). The past decade or so, however, has seen growing
scholarly interest in a broader social history of Jews as a minority group, a subculture within
German society, especially because the study of minorities reveals so much about the general
culture of which they form a part. One need only consult the best recent summary,
Battenberg’s (2001) volume on German Jews from the 16th through the 18th century in
the Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, to witness this increasingly important approach as
well as the need to ‘‘fill the research gap’’ between the medieval and recent periods.
Thus, this article seeks to contribute to an expanding research agenda that includes
‘‘ordinary’’ Jews, explores the least known period of their history, and also examines this
marginal group in its social context, comparing it wherever the data allow with the Christian
majority. The microanalysis summarized here rests on a variety of sources for the city of
Marburg, the economic, administrative, and cultural center for the region of Upper Hesse in
the landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel. While few extant sources originated from Jews themselves,
the municipal and state records used here have much to say about Jews and especially about
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
497
their relationship to the general population, which ranged between 2500 and 6000 during the
early modern period. Several population lists or early censuses, a series of property and tax
records, and even some genealogical information (unfortunately not in the systematic form
characteristic of Christian parish registers but pieced together by local researchers, most
notably Fowler) allow an analysis of household organization, economic activities, and
relative position in the city’s wealth structure at various points in time.
This article uses Marburg data to test some of the current hypotheses or the initial results
put forward in other studies of Jewish social and economic life in the early modern period.
Conveniently, Toch (1995) has summarized some general views about population, household
structure, and family life on which I shall focus:
. . . a small community encompassing only a few licensed families did not necessarily
indicate a small Jewish population in the locality. Jewish families tended to be
considerably larger than non-Jewish ones, in part because licensed heads of households
had to accommodate grown-up and married children not yet permitted to set up their own
independent households. Family size therefore reflected a response to the official
settlement policy rather than of demography proper. Also, licensed Jewish households
belonged to the propertied strata of society and possessed the needs and the means to
employ large numbers of male and female servants and tutors. (p. 83, n. 17)
After tracing general population levels from the 1640s to the end of the 18th century, I will
look at household and family organization more closely to see how this case study reinforces
or modifies Toch’s general picture. Then I will also sketch an economic profile of the Jews in
Marburg, to compare them with their Christian neighbors and with historians’ general
notions of their activities and wealth. Throughout these discussions an underlying theme will
be their legal and political relations with the Christian community, where they remained
outsiders, tolerated by state authorities but usually unwelcome to the city’s artisans and
merchants.
2. The Jewish population of Marburg, 1640s to 1800
Continuous settlement of Jews in Marburg seems to date from the Thirty Years War.
Clearly there had been a medieval community large enough by the 14th century to support
a synagogue, have a cemetery outside the city, and probably cluster near or in what was
later the Judengasse—perhaps not a real ghetto but a small district in a rather undesirable
part of the city north of the central market, clinging to the hill beneath the landgravial
castle (Erdmann, 1987; Fowler, 1989). There some Jewish families lived along the open
ditch that carried waste from the castle down to the river Lahn. Few records still exist of
these medieval Jews (archeological remains of their synagogue are the most striking), and
possibly they fell victim to the wave of pogroms accompanying the Black Death in the
mid-14th century. Exactly what happened to them is unknown; after 1350, however, the
building used as a synagogue passed into Christian hands, and by 1375 the cemetery had
become a garden. Thereafter we have only occasional references to individuals in the city,
498
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
especially the Jews Liebmann and Gottschalk from the late 1520s into the early 1540s. The
two most knowledgeable researchers on the subject, however, agree that probably not
enough Jewish families settled in Marburg after the mid-14th century to resume local
religious services until the mid-17th century (Erdmann, 1987, especially pp. 21–23;
Fowler, 1989, pp. 13–14).
Thus my attempt to document and reconstruct a continuous Jewish presence in Marburg
over the early modern period can begin only with the Thirty Years War. During the 1620s
military action in the region caused dislocations that led some Jews to join other Upper
Hessian villagers in seeking protection within the city’s fortifications. Then again in the
1640s, outsiders crowded into Marburg to avoid wartime dangers, and from this decade came
the first two extant lists drawn up officially to specify the city’s Jewish householders and their
residences. These lists appear in city council minutes, which unfortunately do not make their
exact purpose clear. A reasonable assumption is that the council wished to check that the six
men had official letters patent (Schutzbriefe) from the landgrave, permitting their residence
and economic activity in the city. Such patents placed Jews under landgravial protection and
under the special Jewish Ordinances (Judenordnungen) the Hessian rulers issued successively
in 1539, 1679, 1739, and 1749.1 In return for their privileges, the Jews paid special fees to
both the landgravial and local governments and were to abide by the restrictions placed on
their activities in this avowedly Christian society. Keeping a careful eye on the Jewish
population presumably lay in the interests of both the governmental officials responsible for
state finances and the local authorities whose concerns focused more on citizen complaints
about Jewish economic competition or violations of the ordinances than on the fees that might
increase their budgets. Indeed, the ordinance of 1679 instructed both territorial officials and
city councils to send annual enumerations of the Jewish households in their respective
jurisdictions to the chancellery in Cassel, but some were sending reports even earlier
(Demandt, 1980, p. 27; see Table 1 below). Such regular documentation might have provided
unusually full statistics on Jewish households in Hesse-Cassel over the early modern period,
but if annual reports were actually submitted, unfortunately only a fraction of them have
survived.2
The tables here summarize data on Marburg’s Jewish population and households from
the 1640s through the late 18th century, information derived from lists of varying quality
still found in the Hessian State Archive in Marburg (StAM). The sources consist, first
and most importantly, of several territorial or municipal enumerations ranging irregularly
over the entire period, with an unfortunate gap in the mid-18th century yet also quite
methodical listings between 1781 and 1800. They also include a few counts of the city’s
1
See Battenberg (1983) for a penetrating general discussion and Demandt (1980, pp. 24 – 38) for an excellent
comparative summary of the stipulations in the different Hessian ordinances.
2
An earlier Jewish ordinance dated 5 October 1646, which was drafted, printed, but apparently not circulated
or implemented, had already ordered the detailed annual lists of Jews (including all members of each household)
that were insisted upon in 1679. See StAM Verordnungen Abt. 14: Judensachen 1646 – 1814 for that ordinance as
well as a group of further decrees (in 1696 [referring back to an earlier one in 1689], 1722, 1726, 1744, 1799) that
lament either the absence or the poor quality of Judenlisten local officials were supposed to send the Rentkammer.
On the 1646 ordinance itself, compare Erdmann (1987, p. 212) and Battenberg (1983, p. 88).
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
499
Table 1
The Jewish Population of Marburg, 1640s to 1800
Year
Month
Households
1646
1648
1657
1659
16??
1666
1667
1674
1676
1677
1678
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1688
1696
1699
1701
1702
1704
1710
1721
1726
1727
1730
1730
1731
1735
1736
1744
1771
1781
1783
1785
1788
1788
1789
1789
1790
1791
1794
Feb
Jun
Dec
6
6
3
3
3
5
3
7
6
5
5
5
5
5
5
4
4
4
4
4
5
3
5
4
4
6
7
6
5
7
7
7
7
8
8
10
10
10
10
11
11
13
13
13
13
Mar
Nov
Dec
Dec
Jan
Jan
Jan
Jan
Feb
Feb
Jan
Feb
Oct
Oct
Jul
Aug
Jul
Feb
Jun
Feb
Dec
Mar
Jun
Aug
Dec
Feb
Persons
23
24
25
24
19
34
35
30
30
28
26
28
26
23
22
22
19
32
18
26
20
20
43
42
52
45
50
42
36
41
41
42
44
39
52
51
47
57
Source in StAM
330 Mbg A I 33: Ratsprot. 5 Feb 1646
330 Mbg A I 34: Ratsprot. 29 Jun 1648
19b 1215
19b 1157
40a Rubr. 16 Gen. 2
17I 799 (19 Mar), 805; 19b 1215 (8 Jan)
19b 1215
40a Rubr. 16 Mbg
19b 1215
19b 1215
19b 1215; 40a Rubr. 16 Gen. 1
19b 1215
19b 1215
19b 1215
19b 1215
17e Mbg 421
19b 1215
19b 1215
19b 1215
319 Mbg 74, 75
40a Rubr. 16 Gen. 3
40a Rubr. 16 Mbg
40a Rubr. 16 Mbg
40a Rubr. 16 Mbg
40a Rubr. 16 Mbg
330 Mbg A I 125; KoR 1721 – 22, S. 21
19b 11
330 Mbg B 229; 40a Rubr. 16 Gen. 2
40a Rubr. 16 Mbg: Kunckells Tabelle
19b 1544
40a Rubr. 29 Nr. 110
330 Mbg B 229
40a Rubr. 16 Gen. 1
Demandt in Hess Jb 23 (1973): 305, 312
49d Mbg 379
330 Mbg A II 103: Populationsliste 1781
330 Mbg A II 103: Populationsliste 1783
330 Mbg A II 103: Populationsliste 1785
330 Mbg A II 103: Populationsliste 1788
330 Mbg A II 103: Populationsliste 1788
330 Mbg A II 103: Populationsliste 1789
330 Mbg A II 107: Populationsliste 1789
330 Mbg A II 107: Populationsliste 1790
330 Mbg A II 107: Populationsliste 1791
330 Mbg A II 107: Populationsliste 1794
(continued on next page)
500
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
Table 1 (continued)
Year
Month
Households
Persons
Source in StAM
1794
1795
1795
1796
1798
1800
Apr
Oct
Dec
Nov
Oct
May
12
11
11
11
12
13
56
46
48
50
56
66
330
330
330
330
330
330
Mbg
Mbg
Mbg
Mbg
Mbg
Mbg
A
A
A
A
A
A
II
II
II
II
II
II
107:
107:
107:
107:
107:
107:
Populationsliste
Populationsliste
Populationsliste
Populationsliste
Populationsliste
Populationsliste
1794
1795
1795
1796
1798
1800
StAM = the Hessian State Archive in Marburg.
Fifty-one sources list 365 households.
Forty-four lists enumerate 1600 individuals in 320 households.
entire population (1696, 1731, 1771, 1790), some state and local tax assessments (1721
and 1726), as well as three special cadastral surveys (1677, 1721, and 1771). Altogether
some 51 sources document 365 Jewish households at different points in time over the
entire period. Forty-four of the 51 lists I have used enumerate 1600 individuals in 320
household constellations; they provide the detailed information on household composition
requested in the Jewish Ordinance of 1679, while the others are less informative about
family members or servants. Of course, the usual danger of omissions exists in these lists
as elsewhere in population counts. During an impressive territorial visitation of 1666, for
example, two official lists of Jews (prepared respectively by the local Rentmeister and the
regional Vorsteher of Jewry) named three men with letters patent of landgravial
protection and privilege in Marburg. In its own report to the visitation commission,
however, the city council listed the three with their household members, indicated their
economic activities and harmful competition with citizens, and then complained pointedly
about two ‘‘sneaky foreign’’ Jews with illegal households in the city. (They were the
unmarried but independent son of one of the three privileged householders as well as a
widow and her two sons.) Table 1 includes all five entries, of course, and rests generally
on the assumption that early modern enumerators were probably less likely to omit
members of this distrusted minority than they were, say, to undercount marginal groups
like poor veterans or single women in their general population counts.
What conclusions may we reach about Jewish population developments in Marburg over
the early modern period? First, Table 1 shows that the number of households ranged from
three to a high of 13 by 1789 and averaged seven over the entire century and a half.3 During
the same period, the number of individual Jews living in Marburg at any one time fluctuated
between 18 and 66. In the 18th century, then, for which I can be fairly confident about general
population estimates, Jews usually made up a little less than 1% of the city’s residents (see
Table 2). Even if they may have constituted as high as 1% in late 1730 and again in
1800 (only possible for these dates if we use the 1731 population total as well as a
rough population estimate of 6000 for 1800), they were still below the estimated level
3
Erdmann’s (1987) crude table (p. 45) attempted to indicate the number of Jews in the city but is unclear,
unhelpful, incomplete, and inaccurate (especially since the author omitted any reference to the sources of his
information).
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
501
Table 2
Jews in the Marburg Population
Year
Total
Jews
%
1731
1771
1790
5270
5050
5750
45
42
51
0.85
0.83
0.89
of 1.8% reached in the nearby small town of Kirchhain or by all Jews in the entire
Electoral Hessian population at the end of the old regime (Schubert, 1987, p. 12; Horwitz,
1913, p. 99). Totalling not quite 1% of Marburg’s residents over the 18th century, then,
Jews appear to have remained a fairly stable but tiny minority in the city’s overwhelmingly
Christian populace, keeping pace with but certainly not outdistancing general population
growth.
The data for Marburg do corroborate Toch’s observation that Jewish communities were
larger in the 18th century than earlier, although his explanation for this development seems to
hold only partially for Hesse-Cassel. Using evidence from the Palatinate, Toch (1995) argued
that larger Jewish communities resulted from ‘‘a growing population and only a marginal
increase in the number of places of residence where Jews were permitted to live. . .’’ (p. 83).
Unlike the Palatine counts, however, the Hessian rulers permitted more settlement locations—contravening their own ordinances of 1679 and 1739—and also allowed individual
communities to increase in size.4 In the case of Marburg, the landgraves tolerated more
Jewish residents than the city’s artisans, retailers, or government wished and, indeed, more
than the three households they themselves agreed would be the limit there. Already in the
1650s the city sought expulsion of the Jews taken in, temporarily it had thought, during the
Thirty Years War. Apparently in 1659 Landgrave Wilhelm VI assured the council that only in
exceptional circumstances would more than three Jewish householders receive permission to
live in Marburg. For decades the council appealed to this assurance when it opposed Jewish
applications for Schutzbriefe (Erdmann, 1987, pp. 57, 217, n. 69; compare Cohn, 1933, p. 8),
but as Table 1 reveals, only 5 of the 51 extant records list as few as three households.
Unfortunately, the lists do not always indicate whether household heads were licensed Jews
or interlopers. As already mentioned, the city council’s bringing people ‘‘without protection’’
to the government’s attention in 1666, and enumerators should always have brought this
important point out, had a Jew been living in the city without special permission. The Jewish
Ordinance of 1739 eventually stipulated that privileges would go only to the eldest sons of
already privileged Jews, young men who had reached at least age 25, controlled property (by
4
Horwitz (1913, p. 85) presents gross statistics from 1646 to 1726 that indicate an increase not only in the
number of households in the landgraviate but also in the number of settlement locations from 42 to 149.
According to Kießling’s count (1995, p. 157), the 1744 list of Jews published in Demandt (1973) shows entries for
177 places of settlement in Hesse-Cassel (with 148 of those locations having five households or fewer). In
addition, Horwitz (1913, p. 98) traces an increase in the number of households tolerated in the capital city of
Kassel itself.
502
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
inheritance or marriage) worth at least 500 Rtlr., and were of good reputation (Demandt,
1980, p. 26). How early or how consistently such policies were enforced is difficult to
determine: obviously the government was interested in having only householders who could
pay well for their privileges, and there are earlier instances of heirs being denied official
protection because of their precarious economic circumstances or prospects (for examples
from 1687 and 1722, see Erdmann, 1987, pp. 46, 55). Because of incomplete records and
uncertain naming practices, conclusions about genealogical linkages are extremely difficult,
though clearly not all new householders were the sons of already established Jews.
Consistency between official policy and administrative practice was rare among old-regime
governments, in any case, and we also find poor sons (e.g., Jacob, second son of the Jew
Samuel of Rauschenberg, in 1659: see 330 Mbg B 229) who did receive official protection.
Furthermore, while Jews without permission were supposed to be expelled, the lists make
clear that some remained for a considerable time without acquiring official sanction (the
widow Freitche with two children from 1666 to 1676, for example, or Isaac Samuel from
1726 until late 1730).
Most importantly, however, the lists throughout the entire period show that the Hessian
government not only overlooked some unqualified Jews, perhaps because they were related to
already licensed householders. It also went further and simply increased the number of
privileged households over time. From three on the lists from 1659 through 1667, they had
risen to five by 1676. While the number of officially licensed Jews then fluctuated between
four and five into the early 18th century, by the 1730s six or seven householders were
appearing on lists of official Schutzjuden. On an enumeration for 1744, all eight Jewish
households appeared with this privileged status. After an unfortunate gap in the evidence
between 1744 and 1771, late 18th-century lists are particularly helpful in providing household
information but rather unclear about the legal status of the listed Jews. From 1781 to 1800,
however, their number seems to have fluctuated between 7 and ten privileged householders.
Over the unwavering protests of Marburg citizens and somewhat less insistent petitions of the
city council (Erdmann, 1987, pp. 53–58), then, the Hessian rulers proved quite willing to
tolerate the growth of the Marburg Jewish community. But did this pragmatic toleration alone
account for its size over the early modern period?
3. Jewish households and families
As mentioned earlier, Toch (1995) has pointed to another possible explanation: the internal
composition of Jewish families and households. He has emphasized that governmental
restrictions on settlement and marriage could result in larger households than those of nonJews, just as their relative prosperity could result in an unusually large number of servants.
Over four-fifths of the extant reports for Marburg are detailed enough to allow closer scrutiny
of the Jewish households and, specifically, to see how they might sustain or modify Toch’s
generalizations. Here comparisons that situate Jews within the general population are the
major concern, of course, though they are possible only at a few points in time when
appropriate data from a large sampling of the city’s residents are available. At the present
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
503
state of my research, these points usually fall in the 18th century, especially 1721, 1731, and
1771.
Let me begin with the question of household size summarized in Table 3, which presents
the range, mean, and median for each of the 44 lists that enumerate individual members.
The arithmetic mean itself varied from a low of 3.6 in 1781 to highs of 8.3 in the early
1660s and 8.4 in 1730. The average size for all the Jewish household constellations listed
from 1657 to 1800 was five. With systematic counts of the city’s population for 1731 and
1771, however, direct comparisons are possible between Jewish and other Marburg
households. Table 4 reveals that Jews inhabited larger than average households in both
years, even though 1771 included a single-person household. For the entire century and a
half only 26 such one-person entries appear on lists of Jews, and they involve only six
persons at different points in time. Two of the six were in the same family at different
stages: Ephraim ben Israel, a rabbinic and talmudic tutor at the university, either was
unmarried or had an absent wife in 1771; then his widow appeared alone some eight times
between 1785 and 95. Since 9 of the 10 widows who headed Jewish households over the
early modern period had children (or occasionally a servant) with them, only this last one
lived alone. Almost all Marburg Jews lived with other family members, and only once in
my sample (in the case of Ephraim himself in 1771) was the proportion of Jews equal to the
12.5% of others in the community living in single-person households. In 1731 no Jew lived
alone, while some 14.4% of all Marburgers were doing so. Moreover, 30.3% of those
Christians living alone in 1731 had never married.
By contrast, all but four of the Jewish householders I located in Marburg over the entire
period were or had been married. The earliest of the four exceptions to this rule appeared in
1666, listed initially as a member of his father’s household, but interestingly enough, the
Marburg city council corrected that record. In a special report, it complained indignantly
about Männell, the older son of the properly licensed Jew Seeligman, who–without official
permission–had established an illegal business trading horses and–without being married–
had set up his own household.5 Before vanishing altogether from Marburg documents, the
same ‘‘Mänle’’ reappeared the following year, whether listed by error or by adherence to
council expectations, within his father’s household, an indication perhaps of early modern
social norms linking household formation with marriage. The three other unmarried Jews in
independent households appeared in the late 18th century. An English teacher affiliated with
the university, Isaak Bach, showed up on 9 of the 16 extant listings from 1781 to 1800
(occasionally described as a ‘‘Sohn’’ rather than a fully adult head of his single-person
household), while Saara Leckes received a careful separate listing as a single person outside
her widowed brother’s family from 1781 to 1789, when officials then listed her clearly within
it. Finally in 1796, there was a one-time entry for Jüdin Rahel, probably an unwed mother and
thus the only Jewish participant I have found in the growth of illegitimate fertility in 18thcentury Marburg. These four exceptional cases underscore the special significance of
marriage for Jews themselves (Katz, 1959, p. 13). While they shared this social norm with
5
StAM 17I 805: ‘‘ob er wohl noch unverheuratet, doch sein eigenen Tisch helt’’ (13 March 1666).
504
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
Table 3
Jewish Households in Marburg, 1657 – 1800
Year
1657
1659
16??
1666
1667
1674
1676
1677
1678
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1688
1696
1701
1702
1704
1710
1727
1730
1730
1731
1736
1771
1781
1783
1785
1788
1788
1789
1789
1790
1791
1794
1794
1795
1795
1796
1798
1800
a
N
3
3
3
5
3
7
6
5
5
5
5
5
5
4
4
4
4
4
3
5
4
4
6
5
7
7
7
8
10
10
10
10
11
11
13
13
13
13
12
11
11
11
12
13
Size
Range
Mean
Median
Extended
Fam. Hh.
4 – 10
4 – 11
4 – 11
1–9
3–9
2 – 10
3 – 11
4 – 10
4 – 10
3 – 10
3–8
3–9
4–9
3–8
4–7
3–7
3–8
2 – 14
5–7
2–7
3–7
3–7
4 – 11
7 – 11
3 – 11
3–9
2 – 12
1–8
1–8
1–9
1–8
1–7
1–8
1–8
1–8
1–8
1–7
1–7
1–7
1–7
1–7
1–7
2–8
1–8
7.67
8.00
8.33
4.80
6.33
4.86
5.83
6.00
6.00
5.60
5.20
5.60
5.20
5.75
5.50
5.50
4.75
8.00
6.00
5.20
5.00
5.00
7.17
8.40
7.43
6.43
7.14
5.25
3.60
4.10
4.10
4.20
3.55
3.55
4.00
3.92
3.62
4.38
4.67
4.18
4.36
4.54
4.67
5.08
9.00
9.00
10.00
3.00
7.00
5.00
5.50
5.00
5.00
5.00
5.00
5.00
5.00
6.00
5.50
6.00
4.00
8.00
6.00
6.00
5.00
5.00
7.00
8.00
8.00
7.00
7.00
5.50
2.50
3.50
4.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
4.00
3.00
3.00
5.00
5.00
4.00
4.00
4.00
4.00
5.00
1
3
2
2
0
1
2
1
3
1
1
2
2
0
0
0
0
2
1
1
1
0
1
1
1
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
2
1
2
N with
Servants
N with
Nonrelatives
3
3
3
2
3
3
2
2
1
3
2
1
2
1
3
2
1
2
1
2
3a
1a
5
5
6
5
5
5
4
4
3
4
4
4
5
6
9
8
8
6
6
6
6
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
One household with a brother as servant (Crahmdiener; Knecht u. Ladendiener).
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
505
Table 4
Mean size of households
Year
All
Jewish
1731
1771
4.23
4.02
6.43
5.25
Christians, of course, marriage formed the basis for almost 95% of the Jewish households
tolerated in Marburg.6
Such strong adherence to that norm can bring us back to issues of the internal make-up
of those households. The Marburg data confirm Toch’s view about the generally larger size
of Jewish households, something seen further in the average numbers of children per
household in Table 5. Without parish registers we have no information on completed
families for Jews, of course, but the mean number of coresident children was higher than
that for the general population both in 1731 and 1771. (Even if the comparison is with
Christian households formed only by marriages, as were the Jewish in those 2 years, the
figures are 1.97 and 1.99 coresident children, respectively, and remain well below the
averages for Jewish families).
Toch’s argument about household size points, however, in a somewhat different direction
with regard to children: because of limited access to settlement privileges, he writes, Jews
often had to maintain grown and even married children who were not permitted their own
independent households. While Jewish access to Marburg increased throughout the early
modern period, it was certainly not free or unlimited, and we may well ask if Jewish
householders kept young people, say aged 20 or older, in their homes. Unfortunately, only
a few of the Marburg lists reveal the ages of coresident children. In 1685, a 20-year-old
lame daughter lived with her elderly parents, and one of the sons residing with the widow
Behla had reached 20. Using the ages for 1685, we can calculate that the two sons in
Behla’s household 3 years later were 23 and 21. In 1696, two sons among the 15 children
in Jewish households were 25 and 22, and in 1727, the widow Hanna had a son 22 and a
daughter 24, Levi had a son 22, and Isaac had two brothers aged 23 and 21 in his
6
In his exemplary study based on civil registers for the Jewish population of Metz during the 18th century,
Meyer (1993) addresses several beliefs or ‘‘myths’’ about Jewish demography propagated by writers such as the
Abbé Grégroire and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who feared a Jewish population explosion resulting from a
distinctive pattern of universal marriage at very early ages as well as high fertility and low mortality rates. For his
urban setting with a population between 24,600 and 33,600 throughout the 18th century, anyway, Meyer has
rejected that whole incorrect picture, based as it was largely on the assumption that actual demographic practices
conformed with the halakha, traditional Jewish norms and prescriptions. Rebutting the hypothesis of universal
marriage, for example, Meyer (p. 190) finds that 12.6% of the men and 7.6% of the women in the Jewish
population in 18th-century Metz were never married. By contrast with Metz, Marburg saw near conformity with
universal Jewish marriage, perhaps because of social and ethical norms but also because of the Hessian
government’s increasing toleration, despite official policy stated in the Judenordnungen, of Jewish household
formation in the smaller, underpopulated, and economically weaker city.
506
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
Table 5
Mean number of coresident children
Year
1731
1771
All Households
Jewish Households
Range
Mean
Range
Mean
0–9
0 – 10
1.83
1.78
0–6
0–4
3.60
2.50
household. Nine years later, in 1736, much more striking than Wolff’s two sons at 24 and
21 were Hanna’s daughter Adleck aged 27 and two of Isaac’s brothers still living with him
at ages 34 and 31.7 Although today, all 16 of these young people might well be considered
‘‘grown up,’’ to use Toch’s term, probably only 5 were over the usual marriage age and
thus the usual time for establishing independent households in Central Europe. Although I
have not yet calculated the mean age at first marriage in Marburg itself, I would be
surprised to find it below 25 for males and 23 for females. In any case, without systematic
civil registers, such a calculation for Jews seems impossible, and we can probably never
know if they married earlier or later than others in the city.8 Nevertheless, a 1696 list
enumerating most of the city’s residents, with exceptionally rich information like ages and
family relationships, allows for comparison of Jews with the majority population in this
matter of grown children residing at home. In that year 46 sons and 54 daughters aged 20
and older lived in their parents’ households and made up almost 7% of all coresident
children in the city. While a higher proportion (13.3%) of resident Jewish children in 1696
was ‘‘grown,’’ as Toch’s model suggests was the usual case, remaining at home past the
age of 20 was not rare for either Jewish or Christian young people in Marburg.
But what about married children living in their parents’ households, something Toch might
lead us to expect in Central European Jewish families? While I do not have absolute proof
that the practice never occurred, no extant list I have found indicates two married couples
living in a Jewish household in Marburg. Not only were all coresident children and servants
single, but the kin living with conjugal families were also unmarried. Table 6 indicates the
number of such kin (3.3% of all enumerated Jews) as well as their relationships to the heads
of households (only male householders come into question, by the way, since no Jewish
7
Although the records are difficult to decipher, these individuals—the daughter and the two brothers here—
seem not to have been the same persons as those on the 1727 list.
8
Meyer (1993, pp.219 – 26) has calculated mean ages at first marriage in 18th-century Metz as 23.3 for Jewish
women (1760 – 1789) and 28.6 for men (1770 – 1789). He also compared these figures to those (ranging from 22 to
26.25 for women and 26.6 to 28.26 for men) in four studies of other Jewish populations in France, those (ranging
from 25.7 and 26.6 for women and 27.2 and 28.6 for men) among Christians in Metz, and those (ranging from 25
to 27 for women and 27 to 28 for men) in several Christian populations of Lorraine during the second half of the
18th century. Thus he found the mean age was close for Jewish and Christian men, while Jewish women married
‘‘on the average two to 4 years earlier than either Lorraine women or old-regime French women in general’’ (p.
220). Most importantly from his point of view, Meyer proves that Jews did not marry in their teens, as the halakha
recommended or French 18th-century writers assumed.
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
507
Table 6
Members of Jewish households in Marburg, 1640s to 1800
Year
N
Conjugal Family
Men
Servants
Women Sons
Daughters Male
Kin
Female N
1657
1659
16??
1666
1667
1674
1676
23
24
25
24
19
34
35
3
3
3
4
3
5
5
3
3
3
4
3
7
6
4
3
2
4
4
7
7
7
7
7
6
5
9
10
2
3
6
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
3
2
2
3
2
2
0
1
3
1677
1678
30
30
5
5
5
5
7
8
8
7
2
1
2
0
1
4
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1688
1696
1701
1702
1704
1710
1727
1730
1730
1731
1736
1771
1781
1783
1785
1788
1788
1789
1789
1790
1791
1794
1794
1795
1795
1796
28
26
28
26
23
22
22
19
32
18
26
20
20b
43
42
52
45
50
42
36
41
41
42
44
39
52
51
47
57
56
46
48
50
5
5
5
5
4
3
3
3
4
3
5
4
4
5
5
6
6
5
8
6
6
6
6
8
7
10
10
11
12
11
10
10
10
5
5
5
5
4
4
4
4
3
3
5
4
4
6
5
7
7
7
6
6
8
8
8
8
7
10
11
9
11
10
9
9
9
6
7
7
6
6
5
6
3
7
6
7
5
7
12
16
19
16
16
11
10
9
11
11
11
9
12
11
9
12
13
11
11
14
6
5
8
7
7
7
6
7
8
3
5
2
1
10
8
9
9
14
9
9
9
10
11
11
10
11
9
8
13
12
9
9
7
3
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
0
0
1a
1a
2
0
3
4
0
3
1
4
2
2
2
2
3
3
0
0
0
1
1
1
2
1
0
0
1
2
2
1
2
1
2
3
1
5
5
6
3
6
5
4
4
2
4
4
4
5
6
9
8
8
5
7
7
1
1
2
2
0
0
0
0
2
2
2
1
0
2
2
2
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
2
Non-Kin
Relation to HH
Father, mother-in-law
Mother, 2 mothers-in-law
Mother, mother-in-law
Mother, mother-in-law
Son-in-law
Mother, brother,
brother-in-law
Mother
2 grandchildren,
2 cousins
Grandchild
Father-in-law
Father-in-law, cousin
Father-in-law, cousin
Sister, wife’s brother
Sister, brother
Sister, brother
Sister
Brothers
Brothers
Brothers
Brothers
Sister
Sister
Sister
Cousin
Mother, Cousin
Cousin
Cousin
Brother, Cousin
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
4
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
(continued on next page)
508
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
Table 6 (continued)
Year
N
Conjugal Family
Men
1798 56
12
12
1800 66
13
12
Totals 1600 272
279
%
17.0 17.4
Totals
551 adults
%
34.4
a
b
Servants
Women Sons
Daughters Male
10
9
13
13
391
357
24.4 22.3
748 children
46.8
Kin
Female N
3
9
3
10
79
159
4.9
9.9
238 servants
14.9
Non-Kin
Relation to HH
1
Cousin
2
Brother-in-law, cousin
52
3.3
52
kin
3.3
0
0
9
0.6
9
0.6
Brother as servant (1704 and 1710).
Two children without indication of sex.
widow had kin under her protection). Although kin coresidence among Jews chiefly involved
siblings and widowed parents of the head or his spouse, it also extended laterally to in-laws
(Schwäger/innen) and cousins (Vetter/Kusinen) as well as downward to grandchildren.
Fortunately, once again, the 1696 data also allow comparison with other inhabitants of the
city. Although the population list does not always make precise living arrangements obvious,
in most cases the entries allow reasonable guesses. Table 7 even permits distinguishing
between kin living directly in the same quarters and those in separate apartments or rooms in
the same house.
What general conclusion about kinship may we make from the information in these
two tables? Although usually larger, Jewish households were not more complex than
others in the community. At least the 320 households for which we have detailed
information over the period displayed much the same coresident kin groups as the
overwhelmingly Christian population in 1696. Indeed, Jewish household structure was
slightly less complex, if compared with that of the Christian carpenter Wilhelm Prott, who
headed the only multiple family household I found in early modern Marburg (his in-laws,
Table 7
Relation of coresident kin to heads of Marburg households, 1696
Same quarters
Grandmother
Father
Mother
Wife’s mother
Wife’s stepmother
‘‘Siblings’’
Son
Son’s wife
Son’s child
[Widowed] Daughter
Daughter’s son
Nephew
Separate apartments (rooms) in house
1
2
8
1
1
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
Grandmother
Father
Mother
Mother’s sister
Brother
Sister
2
1
11
1
1
12
Spouse’s father
Spouse’s mother
4
9
2
9
1
2
1
1
2
Son-in-law
Wife of son-in-law
4
1
Spouse’s brother
Spouse’s sister
Sp. Sister’s husband
Sp. Sister’s children
Sp. Sister’s daughter
Sp. Sister’s son
Female cousin
1
Unclear
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
509
alte abgelebte Leute, lived with the carpenter Wilhelm Prott and his wife Anna Catharina)
or with the three Christian households that extended upward as far as the head’s
grandmothers. What I find most impressive, however, is the broadly similar pattern of
kinship relations within households, contrary to Toch’s predictions. The kinship structure
of Jewish households cannot explain their larger size, in my view, as effectively as the
number of their children.
On the other hand, as Toch has reminded us, the presence of servants could also have
contributed to the larger than average size of Jewish households. His argument is a logical
one, given is generally known about the correlation between wealth and household size in
early modern Europe. Specifically, Toch writes of privileged Jews as propertied people, with
both ‘‘the needs and means to employ large numbers of male and female servants and tutors.’’
Before looking at Jewish economic activity and wealth, I want to compare briefly the keeping
of servants by Jews and non-Jews in Marburg. Table 8 summarizes the data on servants for all
the Jewish households I have found and then for the entire population in 1731 and 1771. Only
two Jewish householders ever appear on our lists with more than three servants, hardly a large
number, but consonant with usual practice in the city, where few others kept more help in my
sample years. We should note, though, that Jews had a somewhat better chance than their
Christian neighbors of employing one or two servants. After 1749, Hessian Jews were not
legally permitted to employ more than two Dienstknechte in their trading activities (Demandt,
1980, p. 26), but in Marburg only one Jewish householder on my lists ever hired more, even
before the ordinance. On occasion, both Jews and Christians engaged siblings as servants (the
two Jewish brothers from the early 18th century had counterparts in the two brothers, five
sisters, three sisters-in-law, and niece working as servants in Christian households in 1696),
but one type of employee seems to have been unique to Jews. Since their children probably
did not attend any of the various schools in the city (Soliday, 1993), Jewish parents hired
private tutors who presumably provided religious instruction as well as elementary education.
Sixteen of the 79 entries for male servants in Jewish households were teachers, and the two
Rabbis mentioned in the early 18th-century lists (as boarders, not servants) probably served
the same function. Interestingly enough, the last tutors listed as servants appear on the 1730
list, while the Informator of 1783 was no longer counted as a servant. Thereafter I found no
Table 8
Marburg households with servants
N of servants
Jewish HH 1657 – 1800
All households in 1731
All households in 1771
N
%
N
%
N
%
None
One
Two
Three
Four or more
Total
155
109
42
12
2
320
48.4
34.1
13.1
3.8
0.6
100.0
770
249
120
48
27
1214a
63.3
20.5
9.9
4.0
2.2
99.9
821
289
87
41
19
1257
65.3
23.0
6.9
3.3
1.5
100.0
a
One case unknown.
510
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
Jewish tutors, although rabbis appeared on almost every list from 1783 to 1800. The special
cultural role for several servant–tutors earlier as well as the presence of about twice as many
female as male servants in Jewish households lead me to consider their religious and domestic
requirements much more important in the keeping of servants than a need for employees in
training with the family business.9
4. Economic activities and wealth
Such a view in no way detracts, of course, from Toch’s emphasis on the economic security
of privileged Jews as an explanation for their need and ability to maintain servants in large
households. Indeed, a quick comparison in Table 9 of Jews’ wealth with that of all other
taxpayers and of the Jews’ nearest competitors, the burghers in the Retailers Guild, confirms
his view that Jews were well situated. In my sample years, the mean value of their total
taxable assets always far exceeded the Marburg average. It also surpassed the retailers’ mean
wealth in the early 18th century only to slip below that of their chief economic rivals by 1771.
As might be expected, their specific assets distinguished the Jews somewhat from others in
the community.10 Take houses as a first example. Apparently during the Thirty Years War
they could only rent lodgings, but Erdmann (1987, p. 48) has found that the Jew Itzig bought
a house as early as 1660. He remains the only Jew I can find assessed for a house in the 1677
cadaster. Jews were forbidden from dwelling in the same house with Christians unless dire
conditions made it necessary (Cohn, 1933, p. 15; Demandt, 1980, p. 29). Thus by 1721 five
of the six Marburg Jews owned homes, scattered through the city not clustered in the
Judengasse (compare in general Cohn, 1933, pp. 12–14), although the average assessment on
Jewish houses never reached the mean tax value of other people’s in my 18th-century
samples. Besides their living in less valuable houses, the Jews did not own the garden plots,
brew the beer, or distill the brandy that showed up in Hessian tax records for other residents.
Only two Jews enjoyed income from capital investments in 1731; 40 years later, only one
collected feudal dues in kind (grain) from rural sources. So what accounts for their economic
success?
The earning power (Handthierung) from their occupations was clearly most important: it
always showed the highest mean value among their taxable assets and, at the same time,
ranked their average income far above that of most Marburg residents. Moreover, the
Jews’ mean income from trading compared favorably with that of retailers in the Marburg
9
While their Christian neighbors joined in keeping more female than male servants—for the entire population,
the figures were 55% in 1731, and then 61.2% in 1771—a full two-thirds (66.8%) of the servants in all early
modern Jewish households I have found were female.
10
Contrast Erdmann (1987, p. 49), who declared that the city’s Jews were situated ‘‘financially and
economically in the broad middle ranks [Mittelfeld] of ordinary Marburg citizens’’—without any concrete
evidence, indeed after a brief but appropriate discussion of the difficulties of estimating their wealth relative to that
of the Christian population.
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
511
Table 9
Mean assessments of taxable wealth of Jews in Marburg (mean values in Stfl.)
Taxable assets
All taxpayers
1721
Houses
Brewing
Gardens
Feudal dues in kinda
Capital investments
Income from trade
Animals
Total assets
60.23
156.36
16.86
174.61
287.93
126.50
3.81
201.38
1731
Houses
Gardens
Income from trade
Total assets
59.81
17.55
125.00
131.09
1771
Feudal dues in kinda
Brewing
Distilling
Houses
Gardens
Income from trade
Total Assets
26.43
63.08
51.52
64.62
16.33
100.63
121.12
Jews
Retailers guild
54.00
90.60
51.00
283.33
2.00
345.67
14.00
33.50
83.53
233.43
4.27
313.61
53.60
287.14
325.43
71.00
50.00
195.71
224.29
78.78
17.78
224.63
264.71
34.67
71.50
34.00
96.53
17.37
201.92
271.77
Sources: StAM 330 Mbg A I 125: Renovierter Steuerstock der Stadt (1721); 40a Rubr. XXIX Nr. 110:
Volkszählung (1731); and 49d Mbg 379: Specificatio derer Menschen . . . (1771).
a
Payments in Grain (Fruchtgefälle).
guild, exceeding it handsomely early in the 18th century, then turning slightly lower in
1771. Accounting for this later decline vis-à-vis the Christian retailers is not easy: why
should the general economic malaise still lingering after the Seven Years War or the great
subsistence crisis of the early 1770s have affected Jews more than their rivals? Here,
however, my task is not to address that specific problem but to point to the occupations of
Marburg’s Jewish population. The Hessian landgraves granted Jews economic privileges,
as already pointed out, in the expectation that they would prosper and could thus pay well
for their protected status. At the same time, they were not to injure local handicrafts and
trades where they gained domicile, and the territorial government therefore spelled out
restrictions on matters like charging interest on loans, the retailing reserved for other
privileged groups like guilds, or even keeping servants (see Demandt, 1980, pp. 26–36,
for such regulations). Historians are properly skeptical about early modern governments’
ability to enforce all such regulations (Demandt, 1980, p. 35), and in any case, policy
toward Jews was as contested an issue in Hesse-Cassel as elsewhere. Citizen petitions
512
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
lodged against Jewish settlement and competition provide documentation of firm and then
plaintive opposition (summarized in Erdmann, 1987) to Hessian governmental policy that
grew more moderate over time (Demandt, 1980, pp. 38–42; Battenberg, 1983). In fact, to
learn about Jewish economic activities we usually have to rely on such guild petitions, city
council reports, or informal position papers within governmental agencies. Even individual
letters patent for privileged Jews do not usually indicate just what trades they were
permitted to practice. So the two lists presented in Table 10 are rare glimpses of Jewish
occupations, since they include the entire group in Marburg and offer comments on the
substance and success of individual trading.
Here there are no real surprises, however, for the activities mentioned fit the usual
profile (I might even say the stereotype) for early modern German Jews. They were never
members of guilds, of course, and sold items like cloth or clothing made by others. This
feature and the usually small scale of most of their operations made them similar to
Christian retailers. What probably distinguished them from their more specialized competitors organized within the local retailers guild was selling old clothes, dealing in
Table 10
Jewish trading activities, 1726 and 1771
Name
Houses
Income
Comments on trade
(Tax Value in Stfl.)
1726
Wolff Jacob
Leucus Abraham
Abraham Moses
Jacob Isaac
Jew Schmuel’s Widow
Isaac Samuel
Hanna Jew Hahn’s Widow
1771
Aron Leucas
Abraham Meyer
Salomon Jacob
Levi Salomon
50
60
48
300
420
300
50
60
160
290
100
60
350
20
50
100
70
Jacob Schafte
Jacob Sostmann
50
50
300
Jacob Wolff
70
450
Ephraim [ben Israel]
Sources: StAM 19b 11 and 49d Mbg 379.
deals in retail and all kinds of wares
deals in all kinds of retail goods, also gold and silver
deals with all kinds of retail goods, gold, silver, currency
exchange, and the like
trades horses
deals with all kinds of retail goods
deals in his mother’s name with all kinds of goods
deals in old clothes
deals with cloth, pawned goods, cotton, and all kinds of
silk cloth, also stockings
is ruined and has nothing worth trading
same as previous [entry]
just a little trade, makes living with students, when they
want to pawn something, then he resells to others
a ruined Jew, so has nothing to trade
has pretty good trade with all kinds of things, but small
goods
trades cloth, cotton, pawned goods, and also does other
things
‘‘Jewish Professor’’ [not taxed on income]
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
513
pawned items, and trading such a wide variety of goods. Perhaps most striking in the
entries in Table 10 is the frequent mention of their selling ‘‘all kinds of goods.’’ Probably
equally important was their itinerant peddling, in both the city and the surrounding
countryside, brought up—often with considerable contempt—in other sources from the
period (Erdmann, 1987, p. 47, and passim). But the table should call attention not only to
these differences from the majority community but also to diversity among the Jews
themselves. Not all were successful and wealthy: while only the widow Hanna was
assessed below the mean value of incomes in 1721, four of the seven Jews with income
assessments in 1771 ranked below the city average (the eighth, though not really a
professor, was a special teacher attached to the university, whose privileged personnel paid
no tax on income). In other words, the Marburg Jewish population was much more
polarized in the economic hard times of the early 1770s than earlier, a social division that
characterized many 18th-century Jewish communities (for a Hessian example, see
Demandt, 1980, pp. 43–44).
5. Conclusions
In this article some of Toch’s generalizations about Jewish population and family households have served as an organizational frame for my own case study of Jews in a middle-sized
German town. The Marburg data confirm many of his views: Jewish communities were
dependent on governmental settlement policy, on one hand, and benefited on the other from
an economic position relatively more secure than that of most of their Christian neighbors.
While they remained cultural and social outsiders, the Jews filled a distinctive economic
niche of value to the majority population: peddling or otherwise supplying a wide variety of
retail goods. And although the rewards of their trading activities were unevenly distributed,
they were sufficient to allow the community to pay the price for official toleration and,
indeed, to grow throughout the early modern period.
In the Marburg case, that growth was opposed by the local citizenry but not hindered by
governmental policy, which allowed the number of privileged Jewish households to increase
over the 18th century. This pragmatic toleration meant that a tiny Jewish minority of about
1% kept pace with general population developments. Yet its response to Hessian policy did
not require or involve the kind of family household organization that Toch has posited. True,
Jewish households were usually larger than average in Marburg, but the data do not reveal the
kind of internal complexity Toch leads us to expect. No married coresident children formed
multiple family households among the Marburg Jews. While their families did house a higher
proportion of grown children (aged 20 and over) than Christian households in 1696, the only
sample that allows direct comparison, the presence of such young adults living at home was
not rare in the majority population. Family extension appears, moreover, to have been a bit
less complex in Jewish than in the Christian households I have sampled. While Jews had a
better chance than was usual in Marburg of hiring one or two servants, even if not the large
number Toch emphasizes in his general description, a more striking feature of their households was the number of coresident children in conjugal families. Servants made up 14.9% of
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G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
all Jews (Table 6), only slightly more than the 14.6% and 13.9% of the entire city population
in service during the sample years of 1731 and 1771. Dependent sons and daughters, on the
other hand, made up 42.4% (1731) and 44.2% (1771) of all Marburgers, but an even higher
46.8% of all Jews.11 This proportion of coresident children seems to imply, contrary to Toch’s
argument, that ‘‘demography proper’’ could have played a role—indeed, as significant a role
as Hessian settlement policy—in determining the larger than average size of Jewish households in Marburg. Although the sources are insufficient to allow careful examination of
Jewish fertility and mortality over the 17th and 18th centuries, this inference from data on
family organization seems safe enough to further modify the profile Toch proposed.
Demographic features probably did join economic conditions, social norms, and the Hessian
political authorities’ pragmatic toleration to influence the number and shape of Jewish
households in Marburg.12
6. Uncited references
Battenberg, 1996
Händler-Lachmann and Werther, 1992
Kurschner, 1938
Mack, 1974
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Bad
Godesberg, Germany), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of
11
Interestingly enough, the sex ratios for dependent sons and daughters were reversed for Jewish households
and the general population: while males made up 48.4% (1731) and 45.4% (1771) of coresident children in
Marburg, they constituted 52.3% of dependent children among all Jews. This exceptional situation could have
resulted from demographic features (sex differentials at birth or in infant and child mortality), something we
cannot know, but also from the probability—consistent even with more tolerant Hessian practice than Toch posits
generally—that settlement policies and economic conditions would have made finding places for males either as
servants or as householders more difficult than placing females outside their birth families.
12
Just as frustrating as the absence of systematic records of Jewish births, marriages, and burials for family
reconstitution and demographic analysis are the sparsity of information on places of origin and the unclear naming
practices that make genealogical linkages uncertain. The last problem has thwarted my initial attempts to test an
important hypothesis of local researchers like Erdmann (1987, pp. 44 – 46) and Fowler (personal correspondence).
From their attempts (unsystematic and unclear in Erdmann, more extensive and reliable in Fowler) to collect
scattered genealogical references into a kind of general Stammtafel for the city’s principal Jewish families, both
scholars propose that three big lineages, originating with the holders of the three letters patent from the mid-17th
century, formed the core of the Marburg Jewish community over a long period of time. If such lineages existed and
dominated other families (say, through intermarriage, economic relief, or the cultural patronage of providing
teachers and space for religious rituals in lieu of a synagogue), the wider implications of kinship and patronage
might add significantly to the present analysis based on household organization.
G.L. Soliday / History of the Family 8 (2003) 495–516
515
Texas at Dallas for financial support of the research for this article. A preliminary draft was
presented at the October 2000 meeting of the Social Science History Association in
Pittsburgh and the December 2000 meeting of the Dallas Area Social History Group.
Further archival work led to considerable revisions, which were presented initially in a
public lecture to the Verein für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde at Marburg in July
2002. For their generous help in Marburg thanks go especially to Angus Fowler, Gerhard
Menk, and Elke Matijevich.
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